Friday, June 20, 2008

Good Texas posture

I’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t understand Texas – especially Yankees. That’s why I was so happy to run into this YouTube video, yesterday, showing a typical Texas rite de passage. As my friend, Mr. Lumpenprof, can tell you, this is the way we do things down here - and boy howdy, there’s no funner way to make sure kids grow up standing straight and tall – we do hate bad posture in the Lone Star State! This kind of thing happens all the time on these lazy summer days in my neighborhood – you hear kids giggling, their mothers crying for them to stand still, and occasionally howls of pain – I always smile and think, somebody wasn’t listening to Mom!

What Texans have a hard time understanding is that Yankees just don’t have these fun childhood games. I don’t know, but I think this is the reason Yankees are so weird!

You've been to Fredericksburg?I like that little town, in spite of the hokey German heritage tourist thing going on there. Too bad it isn't historically honest - which would mean honoring the German SOCIALIST heritage.

Freidenker! There were free-thought papers out there in the Hill Country.

Do check out the Easter fires. Doughty German settlers. Indian raiders. Dancing wild flowers. Songs of faith. The faith of our fathers, as a matter of fact. You can make a day of it, Enchanted Rock, the Nimitz Museum, and in the evening out to the fair grounds for the premier ethnic heritage pageant of Gillespie county!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.